For those of you who keep track of such things, you will recall that one of the touchstones of the gigantologists’ claims for existence of giants is that the bones of these antediluvian monsters have disappeared as part of an intentional conspiracy by world governments, museums, and academics to sequester or destroy any evidence of the veracity of the Bible. (“The Smithsonian has been at the center of a vast cover-up of America’s true history since the 1880s,” Richard Dewhurst wrote in The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America.) To that end, where such information is available, gigantologists have pointed to cases where newspapers reported that “giant” bones were dispatched to the Smithsonian Institution or other museums and yet the same museums maintain that they have no record of the arrival or storage of any such remains of Nephilim.

I must confess that I did not consider the problem especially vexing and was quite happy to put the solution down to newspaper reporters’ penchant for making things up. Undoubtedly at least some of the reports are fabrications, as was common in nineteenth century newspapers. However, I read a piece of information that helped clear up the otherwise inexplicable belief that giants’ bones were “disappearing” from museums, and in fact it tells us something important: At least some of the “giant” bones are right where they are supposed to be, and never left the museums. Our testimony comes from an 1891 essay on giants by Andrew Wilson, F. R. S. E., a Scottish professor of science, in the Humboldt Library of Science:

Thus fossil sloths and elephants of large size had been doing duty for giants of the human race; and the teeth of human giants, which used to be so conspicuously displayed in museums, were relegated to their proper sphere under the description of the armature of elephants’ jaws.

Indeed, at the 1878 Inter-State Industrial Exhibition in Chicago, the editor writing for Henry A. Ward (probably actually Ward himself) said exactly the same thing in his notice on the wooly mammoth for the display of a replica of one at the exhibition: “Collections of them (mammoth bones) have been made in European Museums for more than two centuries past; at first considered to be the remains of giant men, and later recognized in their true character of bones of a great extinct Elephant.” A remnant of this slow changeover in European museums can be seen today in Paris, at the entrance to the paleontology wing the Museum of Natural History, where, according to Claudine Cohen, one of the dinotherium bones mistaken for those of the giant Teutobochus in the 1600s is still on display under a sign reading “Bone from the giant Teutobochus preserved at the Château of Langon.” And then it clicked for me: Everyone might be telling the truth, more or less. The Victorian newspapermen may have been quite right that when the bones popularly ascribed to giants were dug up they were boxed and shipped back to the Smithsonian, but the Smithsonian may also be right that they received no bones from Nephilim-giants. Instead, on their end they received boxes that their experts would have immediately classified as mammoth, mastodon, or other megafauna bones and stored away in the natural history collections as those animals. Dr. Wilson’s testimony helps lend credence to that theory, since he testifies that European museums reclassified their “giant” bones as animal fossils after Cuvier had exposed the truth. Indeed, we have already seen that churches in Europe, which were filled with the same fossils posing as giants’ remains, as often as not boxed them up and sent them into storage when the truth came out.

Now the caveats: Obviously, this explanation is not universal and will not account for every last case of giant bones. In fact, as we shall see, many were more likely wrongly measured human bones, and still more reports may have been hoaxes. But of the residuum, at least some seem to have been reclassified. We can add to this a few more cases from other museums that seem to suggest that this is what happened. In 1681, Dr. Nehemiah Grew reported that some travelers in Syria sent back “the Thigh-Bone of a Giant,” but upon its receipt at the Royal Society’s collections at Gresham College, careful measurements of its proportions determined that the item was in fact the femur of an elephant (probably an extinct one). The travelers thought they dispatched a giant’s bone, but on the other end, it was reclassified so that any visitor to the collection would only have seen an elephant’s femur. According to the Illustrated London News for January 8, 1916, some men digging a trench around 1913 or 1914 found what they thought were ancient dice and took them to the British Museum, where they were reclassified as the fossilized wrist bones of an extinct elephant. Had we heard the story from the men rather than the museum, we’d instead have heard that they sent ancient dice to the British Museum and that no such dice could be found there. It would be fascinating to try to correlate conspiracy theorists’ imagined cases of “giant” bones vanishing from the Smithsonian or other museums with accession records for megafauna bones to see if this suggestion holds up as well in America as it does for European giants. To this we can add that according to the Smithsonian’s 1911 annual report, in 1910, Dr. Aleš Hrdlička, the most important physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum—villain in many giant conspiracies—undertook a massive “reclassification and rearrangement” of the physical anthropology collections at the museum while moving them to a new building. If any mammoth bones lingered on as “human,” they were almost certainly sent to their correct department by then. In fact, Hrdlička indicated that he was personally involved in making some of the alleged “giants” disappear—but through science. In 1934, Hrdlička told Science News Letter (syndicated to newspapers as well) that the Smithsonian received a steady stream of monthly letters from everyday Americans who swore up and down that they had discovered the bones of giants. Hrdlička said that, with the rare exception of someone suffering from agromegaly (the Smithsonian has a set of just such Native bones), these were always (and tiresomely) the result of the same three errors: (a) ignorant of anatomy, they measured the thighbone against their own bodies without accounting for the upper joint’s insertion into the pelvis; (b) ignorant of geometry, they failed to realize that jawbones are parabolas and therefore slip over one another without the need to be gigantic in size; and (c) ignorant of other species’ anatomy, they mistake mammoth bones for human. Hrdlička claimed that he had seen many Mexicans make that third mistake on his trips to collect bones for the museum. Obviously, if Hrdlička could identify the errors, he must have been involved in examining alleged “giant” bones in order to determine that they were no such thing, despite what their finders believed. This seems to be pretty good evidence that at least some of the “giant” bodies sent to or examined by the Smithsonian were simply reclassified under their correct headings, and did not vanish at all. They are found among the “normal” bones and the animal bones, right where they should be. Nevertheless, the Science News Letter reporter said that the Smithsonian disabused all inquirers of the existence of giants. “It is a thankless task, and sometimes the people who so eagerly asked the Smithsonian’s opinion are downright annoyed to have their folktale allusions shattered.”

Some things never change, but from this we can glean that in a typical “giant” situation, a Smithsonian representative examines the bones, collects them for the museum (as was standard practice then), and delivers the fatal verdict before the finder rejects the conclusion and maintains that the bones were in fact gigantic. Much later, when fringe writers and creationists try to find evidence of the “giant” bones, they can’t because they never were giant and never entered the Smithsonian under such a title. Thus, the “lost” giants fell into a classification trap, suspended between two worldviews.

Amazing how ALL the world's governments & scientists can collaberate in 'hiding' giant's bones when they can't agree on politics or religion or economics or anything else. And it applies to EVERY country dispite radical changes in administration, coups, annexations, revolutions.

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Paul

5/21/2016 09:49:41 am

This article makes reference only to individual bones. There are whole intact skeletons that are not showing up where they should be...i.e. Smithsonian.

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juliet jones

6/25/2017 07:45:12 pm

It's not at all amazing that all the World's governments & scientists can collaborate on "denial of giant's bones" They have an agenda of evolution and the denial of the Biblical account of creation, especially Genesis 6 where it talks about the fallen angels called the "sons of God" because they were created and the daughters of men with whom they copulated and the results were the Giant Nephilins. This was the reason for the Genesis Flood because the human race was being corrupted by the fallen angels. Only Noah and his family didn't have the DNA from the fallen angels. We can't expect our world's governments & scientists who have been educated beyond their intelligence to believe the Word of God. They would rather destroy the evidence and come up with their own humanist theories.

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Josh Hauck

5/22/2015 05:25:12 am

As someone who works in a museum, I can say that I find your theory to be perfectly convincing. I don't work with fossils, but I do work with meteorites, and I've seen a fair number of people donate coal slag or conglomerates that they sincerely believe to be meteorites. I haven't found a good way to tell someone that the chunk of slag they're carrying isn't work a fraction of the money their grandfather paid for it in auction, or whatever. We thank them, correctly classify the item within our records and chuck it into a box somewhere. There are probably people lurking around with copies of the accession paperwork listing the "meteorite" they donated, which will mysteriously not show up in our catalog.

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Shane Sullivan

5/22/2015 07:25:02 am

Furthermore, I suppose people (who believe in giants) probably expect some kind of paper trail to be attached to that kind of reclassification--a big red tag in the museum's files that says, "this woolly rhino pelvis was labelled 'giant' when we received it!"--but I'm guessing that's not the case, especially with Josh Hauck's testimony above.

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Uncle Ron

5/22/2015 08:13:04 am

It would be instructive, historically interesting, and perhaps help prevent a new generation of giant seekers if some of the specimens were labeled "Originally thought to be ... ."

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Randy Wright

5/22/2015 09:38:43 am

This is an elegant hypothesis, Jason, and certainly reasonable. I'm not sure, however, that it will find acceptance with some who desperately need this sort of information. Some are too vested in their returns on their misinformation machines, and others are convinced the Earth is 6,000 years old and won't hear any information to the contrary. My sources and consultants tell me the last mammoths and mastodons expired on the order of 10,000 years ago.

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Clint Knapp

5/22/2015 06:45:56 pm

Close enough for the larger scope of mammoth existence, but a population of mammoths did survive until about 2000 BCE on Wrangel Island near Russia.

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Randy Wright

5/23/2015 06:37:07 am

That crowd doesn't believe in the C-14 dating either, which established the existence of that population way up north. But thanks for the fact-checking; in the re-write I'll make sure I say "most" or "nearly all expired," but I'm guessing some will claim it's evidence Noah's vessel finally finally landed in that vicinity, and the Lord in His Wisdom had included mammoths on the ark. Probably shouldn't give Scott Wolter ideas for his next shooting locale, however.

David Bradbury

5/22/2015 10:33:09 pm

The problem is exacerbated by the sloppiness of quoted reports. For example there's an oft-mentioned find from 1884 in "Gartersville Mississippi" reported in the Detroit Free Press, which, if it's the 1884 report on this page:
http://www.s8int.com/giants19.html
is from Bartow County in an unnamed state.

As it happens, *C*artersville, in Bartow County *Georgia*, is the site of the renowned Etowah Indian Mounds, which were indeed studied by Smithsonian researchers in 1883.

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David Bradbury

5/24/2015 08:36:25 am

PS: Jason's tweet yesterday about Ancient Origins led me a little further down the rabbit-hole, as the page referenced does include a report of a 7-foot skeleton at Etowah Mounds. While checking the source (absolutely genuine, 12th report of the Bureau of Ethnology, page 302) I noticed that giants similar to the "Gartersville" one were also reported in books and web pages as from "Gastersville, Pennsylvania", apparently originating from a report in The American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal, 1885:
http://www.mocavo.co.uk/The-American-Antiquarian-and-Oriental-Journal-1885-Volume-7/955082/73

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Colin Hunt

5/23/2015 03:44:04 am

Cannot comment on veracity of the input, but interesting article on attached site which I find hard to believe. Evidence to the contrary would be interesting, and appreciated:

The World News Daily Report is a click-bait "satire" site that produces fictional articles for "entertainment" purposes. It's in their disclaimer.

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Colin Hunt

5/23/2015 05:10:59 am

Ah! Thanks for update. I doubt their disclaimer is quoted by anyone in the "Alternative Theory Category". Their followers, who want to be led, will will take everything as truth and be led. I really feel sorry for those who unquestionable accept being led like a bull by the nose, with no intellectual questioning as to why they are led
Surely there must be laws that prohibit such transparent manipulation of the public and facts. Sure, there are legal caveats in publications, but if the publications 'satire' goes beyond limits (i.e. outright lies).

Anyone ever run across Ed Conrad? He was infamous for posting rants on usenet about how the Smithsonian was suppressing his discovery of human body parts preserved in coal. My favorite was his claim to have found a human brain, but the Smithsonian kept turning him away. Conspiracy!

I´ve just read Dewhurst book and the thought of mastodon bones have struck me more than once. But the book also tells about the Mound Builders and why would they have buried mammoths and elephants in their graves?

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Damon

10/7/2015 11:03:05 pm

Interesting. You may be correct in some cases but like every person who posted in agreement with what you wrote, your conclusion lacks tangible evidence proving that at least some of the bones sent to the Smithsonian weren't in fact those of giant hominids. I guess in the end the skeptics are as much at a loss to prove giant beings never existed as believers are in proving that they did.

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James Metcalfe

1/10/2016 12:09:14 am

good theory and well presented, but this doesn't solve the issue of several entire skulls being found in places such as mexico and peru

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James bricklayer

2/15/2016 11:38:19 am

This article seem to be for entertainment purposes only as well.

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Jason

4/22/2016 01:34:24 am

I could easily see that with femurs, but not with skulls. When you read the actual accounts from the 1800s to early 1900s, they describe human skulls, and indeed show some photos, that are clearly from some type of human.

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Americanegro

8/23/2016 11:11:27 pm

If we've learned nothing else from Scott Walter (aside from the savage gin binges and closeted homosexuality) we've learned that THE SMITHSONIAN ABSOLUTELY CANNOT BE TRUSTED.

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Danny

1/7/2018 06:54:41 am

With all the leg bone disinformation is understandable, TO A POINT! Giant skulls (human) been known, written by historians long before (publishing was invented ,bibles) Doesn't matter, anything atheist dissaproove during discovery , jackhammer (pick, sledgehammer nighttime) making sure religious fanatics atheist themselves

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I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.